In vino veritas, and what you say when your mental filters are down sometimes still holds true on clearer reflection.  The subway has its own rhythms, as surely as any sonnet or sestina.  Waiting on the local platform as the express goes by you can hear it, clak-ke-te-KLAK clak-ke-te-KLAK clak-ke-te-KLAK
clak-ke-te-KLAK, each car a line and each train a stanza.  It has a set of verses for the morning commute, and yet another for the evening rush home.  My favorite, though, is the song it sings in the small hours of the night, when all trains are local, and you’re slumped onto your tan or orange blue seat
dreaming of your safe warm bed approaching station by station. The poem then is like some long-forgotten ballad of complex structure, long dark tunnels of narrative interrupted by shorter passages of opening and closing doors at the platform, like the bob-and-wheel of a medieval epic.

        I had a professor in college who joked that all poems are only ever about sex, God, or death (and quite possibly all three at once).  Under these criteria, the subway definitely qualifies.  Far more than the skyscraper, the subway is the true symbol and key to the city.  New York is infinitely fertile, brimming with new ideas, diverse peoples, and creativity.  The subway, tunneling through the bedrock of the New York archipelago, is surely as powerful an image as the seed hidden within the tilled furrow, spring’s perhaps hand which comes carefully out of nowhere or, if you want to bring Freud into it, the dark receptive place without which no skyscraper could ever rise or be more than empty stone.  The subway is the song of the city and a song of creation. There’s something undeniably messianic about it, as you wait on the platform. First, the slight rumblings and rumors of rumblings, then the first faint
gleams of light playing down the rail, growing in strength until finally you can see the train itself, barreling down like the Second Coming until, with a heraldic rush of air, it arrives.

        But what about all the time before?  Waiting, hoping, for the train that will not appear and will not appear, and maybe your head’s a bit fuzzy and you’re bladder a bit full from long hours in a dim pub with nothing but a pint between you and the deep dark night of the soul, and still the train will not appear. It’s not a train you’re waiting for at that point, but rather some long desired and still unfulfilled promise, as surely as any Romeo crying out for light to break through yonder window.  This is more than waiting; it’s faith.  And what is love but faith?

        I like how New York’s subways are unapologetically industrial, heavy metal beams with flaking paint and dull tarnished rails.  Somehow, in the midst of all that has been bleared, smeared with toil, its romance is never spent, there is “the dearest freshness deep down things.”  Many, probably most, don’t see anything poetic in the subway.  If they see it as an allegory of love at all, it is only in the most cynical sense, “stand clear of the closing doors.  There is another train directly behind this one.”  It takes courage and persistent faith to see life as more than train of brief and consecutive disappointments. It takes vision to see New York as beautiful, an ear alert to the subtle cadences and rhythms and counter-rhythms, a heart receptive to the whispered secrets of these islands and peninsulas.   Women like poems about them – who doesn’t want to hear that herself compared favorably to the stars and moon? The girl who can hear the poetry in a subway, though, now that’s someone special.

Philip grew up in Kansas, but has been living in New York for the last three years.  He finds the move from the middle of nowhere to a small, highly urban island amusingly ironic.  He lives in Harlem and is studying literature at Fordham in the Bronx, which means a lot of time on the D train, where he once saw someone selling fried chicken.